Monday, June 30, 2003

It is a pity that all of us have to pay taxes at all. But that really goes back to original sin; that is the fall of Adam and Eve. Otherwise we would all be living in the Garden of Eden, but we are not.Michael Egan, NSW Treasure (June 2003)

Australia The Office: Discretionary Powers

A special investigation by reporter Chris Masters uncovers how fraud involving millions of dollars was perpetrated by a network of ATO officers in tandem with former officers and crime figures.
Masters' report demonstrates how ATO safeguards had failed. It also strengthens the case for a strong and activist body to monitor the ATO such as IGOT
"The Office" details not only how corruption was committed but also profiles the broader culture in which it was able to flourish... a culture of low morale, boozy lunches and high absenteeism, as well as confusion about old and new methods of tax enforcement. · Tax Club [ABC 4Cnrs]
· An officer in the ATO's large business unit: a key player [SMH ]

Sunday, June 29, 2003

Revenue Canada claims neither move was related to the Radwanski file. But highly placed sources say the two investigators were pushing the Radwanski probe much deeper than the department wanted. · Lapdogs [TorontoSun]

Radwanski affair The rule book for parliamentarians

Prime Minister Jean Chretien moved quickly yesterday to restore credibility and order at the embattled Privacy Commission by appointing a long-time clerk of the House of Commons to replace the disgraced George Radwanski.
But if the parliamentary committee that investigated Mr. Radwanski and his conduct has its way, the whole process for appointing officers of Parliament will be reviewed and overhauled to remove the patronage from such appointments and ensure MPs and senators have more say in their selection.· Legislature: MarcoPolos [ Canada.com]

Mr. Radwanski signed his own expense claims; a questionable $15,000 travel advance; giving contracts to people with "personal ties" to Mr. Radwanski and a large year-end advertising contract that was supposedly issued to get rid of a large year-end surplus.· Travel Advance [Canada.com]

Non-lodgers, or non-filers as they are often known, are individuals who do not lodge or file a tax return. By not lodging a tax return statement these people are not part of ‘the system’ and are rarely included in research. This research note provides an analysis and interpretation of the information about non-filers gained from two of the centre’s surveys of the Australian community and reviews the international literature.· Non Fillers [Centre for Tax System Integrity, Australian National University (PDF file

Saturday, June 28, 2003

Australia: GST New squad to crack down on GST dodgers

A new tax office squad will target GST evasion and the black economy from next week. The 400-strong group will be headed by first assistant commissioner Michael Monaghan and bring staff working on tax evasion across the Australian Taxation Office under one umbrella. By bringing these people together the tax office wants to give serious non-compliance a higher priority and focus across the organisation.· Compliance [Age&Taxes]
· Schemes [Australian]

Almost a decade ago, On July 5, 1994, Mr Bruner registered the trade name "More Black Ink" under the Ontario Business Names Act. It cost him $60.00 to do so. On July 29, 1994, he sold that trade name to the company, and in payment for it the company gave him a non-interest bearing promissory note with a face value of $l trillion dollars ($1,000,000,000,000), having a maturity date 499 years in the future, that is on July 29, 2493. · Bruner filed a GST return for $70 billion [Canadian Case]

When profits shrink, firms lay off more workers and slash the pay of those who remain. Naturally, these people stop buying as much as before. Other consumers hold back because they figure if prices continue to drop, they can get better deals later on. All of this means fewer sales, which put an even greater squeeze on profits. This results in more layoffs and lower pay, which can turn into a vicious downward cycle. · Deflation is a bigger risk than the optimists are willing to admit [CommonDream ]

Friday, June 27, 2003

IT FirstPay Inc.

FirstPay Inc. left hundreds of clients, including some in Richmond, in hock with the IRS for millions of dollars. The Silver Spring, Md.-based payroll service company was forced into involuntary bankruptcy, and its assets were seized this month after the owner died March 24 in a boating accident in the British Virgin Islands.· Clients were unaware that they owed taxes [TimeDispatch ]

Thursday, June 26, 2003

Opponents of companies based in low-tax jurisdictions to avoid US taxes won a significant victory last week when lawmakers successfully amended a bill in the House Appropriations Committee to prevent such firms from bidding for contracts from the Department of Homeland Security's $29 billion budget.
[TaxNews]

Welcome to the Directory of Open Access Journals. This service covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals. In
future it plans to add more tax related journals.
· Journals Full Text [Directory of Open Access ]

Wednesday, June 25, 2003

GST It's the GST's third birthday, and it's still a winner for the Government

I think it might be an idea to celebrate the GST's birthday with a bit of an audit. The media have lost interest in it, but we all have to keep paying it and I get a steady trickle of letters from readers inquiring about its health and welfare.
Just how much money is it raising? How much of that money is going to the premiers as promised? Has it put an end to tax evasion? And, to put it bluntly, how many of the promises we were made have turned out to be "non-core"?
· GST proved to be an absolute ripper of a revenue-raiser [In the name of GST: Ross Gittins]

Tuesday, June 24, 2003

Blog Marketing Corporate Executives Begin to Explore Using Blogs

The Corporate Blog Is Catching On: Alan M. Meckler, the head of Jupitermedia, keeps a Weblog, an online journal of his thoughts. He says he didn't notify the company's lawyers.· Corporate Blog by PA? [NTimes ]
· Meckler [Weblogs ]

Maybe you claimed your 5-year-old daughter was 4 to get the under-5 discount.
You wouldn't be caught dead reading "Beowulf," so maybe you copied the homework from an obliging friend. Or perhaps your resume says you graduated magna cum laude, when it was really only cum laude.
You had a good reason for doing what you did. Or so you thought.
· Tax Cheating is everywhere [JSOnline ]

Where is the line between trying to save money on your taxes and trying to rip off Uncle Sam? As the Internal Revenue Service sees it, that line runs straight through some of the sophisticated investment vehicles created solely as tax benefits for high-net-worth individuals. The IRS is taking aim at these taxpayers as well as the law firms, accounting firms and investment banks offering "abusive tax shelter" products – such as "Cobra," "Opus" or "Blip" · To Well-heeled clients. [Dallasnews]

Business is the only thing that’s really great to write about any more. It is the last area of society where there is power that can affect people’s lives for better or worse and can be largely unchecked. You are not going to have another Nixon or see the CIA run amok. Lots of people learned a lot from the ’60s and ’70s. The complexity of the business world has presented barriers to entry, Eichenwald says; often, this is “either because people don not understand it or because people don not pay attention.
He says he is not reflexively anti-business, but anti-crime, and that he is driven, in part, by knowledge that massive corporate crime has little victims: the elderly investors who lost all because of Prudential-Bache’s fraud in the 1980s or the struggling farmers who had to pay higher prices for feed additives because of ADM’s price-fixing schemes. · The Informant: A True Story [Swarthmore ]

Monday, June 23, 2003

US Even Conservatives Should Fight Corruption and Curb Excessive Government Spending

Here is a news update from Taxpayers for Common Sense. TCS is the best organization that monitors excessive government spending, corruption and corporate welfare. Bloated Government Gets Diet Plan Most Americans know that massive government agencies waste unconscionable amounts of taxpayer money. Bureaucratic bungling, wasteful spending and outright fraud lead to billions of dollars going down a massive rat hole every year. · (GAO) presented lawmakers a roadmap, for saving billions in taxpayers' money (Progress)

Sunday, June 22, 2003

Governments in Australia now collect nearly as much from property taxes as they collect from motor vehicles, general payroll and gambling taxes combined.
Australia Sentenced to Renting

THE rate of home ownership would plunge in the next decade unless stamp duty was reined in, the real estate industry has warned. As housing affordability declined, Australia would face a generation of renters who would never own their own home, according to the Real Estate Institute of Australia. Studies show home ownership is declining among some age groups, particularly 25 to 34-year-olds. · Future [DT ]

Saturday, June 21, 2003

Deflation 2004 AD Stone Cold Gold

Gold traditionally has been touted as a hedge against inflation. So why, at a time when the Federal Reserve is worried about deflation, do so many smart money managers like gold? Pick a reason, any reason: -- It's a hedge against geopolitical turmoil. -- It's a hedge against deflation. -- It's a hedge against inflation, which will rear its ugly head once efforts to stimulate the economy take hold... · All or some of the above [LosAngeles19/6/03 ]

Tudor Times If you build it they will come: Blogging and the new citizenship

There's an old joke where two kids are sitting in a room and one says to the other, There's an aphrodisiac behind that radiator. And the other says, What's a radiator? The valuable lesson to learn from this piece of frippery is to define all your key terms, so that when I say, bloggers are the new public intellectuals, I will go on to give a definition of both public intellectual and blogger. And I'll begin with the latter because it is easier.· The new public intellectuals are out there [RoadToSurfdom]

Friday, June 20, 2003

Taxes which are easy to collect tend to be extended and expanded with similar ease by legislative bodies. The withholding provisions make it easy for the Treasury to collect taxes from wage earners and low-income groups. We must be ever vigilant to prevent this ease of collection from being used as a lever further to lower personal income tax exemptions or otherwise to impose new burdens on low-income groups.--National Lawyers Guild
(U.S. House Hearings 1942, vol. 2: 2302)

Australia Tax return fear makes us pay too much

Dr Margaret McKerchar has just done a study on personal taxpayers. She found that while most of us genuinely want to get our tax returns 100 per cent right, we find the legwork involved too difficult. And so we err on the side of caution and end up overpaying the tax man.· Income [ SMH]
· Tax academics, writers and administrators from Australia and New Zealand [Australasian Tax Teachers Association]

Thursday, June 19, 2003

If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be...The People cannot be safe without information. When the press is free, and every man is able to read, all is safe.- Thomas Jefferson

Newspapers are a great tool for teaching and learning about the value of public records.

Freedom From Information Practical Public Records in Action!

Jeanene Harlick of the Santa Cruz Sentinel reviewed local government and non-profit records to find that when it comes to $4.3 million in annual county grants, "financially floundering agencies are routinely given more public money. There is minimal follow-up with agencies that fail to turn in yearly audits." · Angry yet? [SantaCruz viaScoop]

Across southeast Michigan, taxpayers are being shut out of meetings and denied access to public records as officials thwart citizen efforts to learn what government is doing on their behalf -- with their money.
· Taxpayers [ Freep]
· Public Data [Indigan ]

Wednesday, June 18, 2003

Molly Ivins Can't Say That Can She? People First

The reason people hate paying taxes is because they know the system isn't fair. We don't have a progressive tax system in this country anymore, and we certainly don't have one in Texas. It is mind-boggling that the Republicans took away child tax credits for low-income working people. It was such a gross distortion in favor of the rich and against working people that it created an immediate backlash and forced the White House to ask Congress to reverse itself. · Physician, heal thysel [TomPaine ]
· The Age of Tax Debate [ACOSS]
· Government Secrecy in the Age of Information [FAS]

A looming financial crisis in Alabama's state government has sparked an improbable debate about how Christians should treat the poor reported the Times newspaper at the weekend. To the consternation of White House officials who are promoting their strategy of tax cuts as an engine for economic revival, Alabama's Republican governor, a devout Christian who has been described as Bush's spiritual soulmate, has parted ways with the president. Governor Bob Riley believes that the rich are morally obliged to pay more tax, not less.· Biblical Stories [Ekklesia ]
· Brad Joondeph, our resident state tax guru [AMinorityOfOne (viaATaxingBlog)]

Sunday, June 15, 2003

Truthful and courageous news media is the water that keeps the Tree of Liberty growing because broadcasting the truth safeguards Freedom and Justice for all.- Aldo Vidali

Which came first .... the Death or Taxes:)

No wreaths please -- /especially no hot-house flowers. /Some common memento is better, /something he prized and is known by.William Carlos Williams

Memo to My Two Daughters Ashes To Art (Hi, Papa, Dedko, Jozef)

Miss that special someone? Now you can keep them around, even after they're dead. A Seattle artist is making urns from human ashes, following a formula Josiah Spode invented in 1797, producing fine English china glaze by adding calcinated cow bone to the company's clay mixture. Friends and relatives of various deceased gave him the ashes he's using in his human urn sculptures. Each comes in an edition of two, one piece for the commissioning parties and one for him. · Dust to Dust [Seattle Post-Intelligencer 06/13/03]

Saturday, June 14, 2003

Susan Pace Hamill, a University of Alabama tax professor with a theological degree from an evangelical divinity school, caused a stir with a law review article called An Argument for Tax Reform Based on Judeo-Christian Ethics, which makes an evangelical case for making the tax system fairer.

A Christian Opinion What Would Jesus Do? Sock It to Alabama's Corporate Landowners

Win or lose, Alabama's tax-reform crusade is posing a pointed question to the Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family and other groups that seek to import Christian values into national policy: If Jesus were active in politics today, wouldn't he be lobbying for the poor?· How much is Caesar's? [NY Times]
· A Baptized Marx [Alalalalabama ]

Susan was with the I.R.S., but subsequently, she became a professor at the University of Alabama School of Law.
· Ex Tax Collector [Susan Pace Hamill ]

Excessive government intervention, high taxes, and restrictions on property rights and the freedom to work are eroding economic freedom in Australia. Unless reforms resume, Australians will not be able to reap the full benefits of closer economic relations with the United States. The growing integration with the relatively free US economy will make further reforms imperative and will make integration with the US more rewarding.· Our Children the big losers [The Centre for Independent Studies (PDF file)]

While states scramble for money, the federal government is cutting taxes. What does that mean to the average American? Some will pay more to their state than they get back from Washington, others will come out ahead — depending on where they live and their habits, like smoking, drinking or speeding.

US States craft budget plans

An Associated Press analysis of budget work in all 50 states found many are trying to target their tax hikes or increase fees — allowing politicians to make claims that they did not raise income taxes. But those states that have raised across-the-board taxes such as income, sales or property taxes will get more money.· Be prepared for tough times and tough choices [Dodgeglobe]

As the State Legislature prepares to levy the largest tax increase in the history of the state on us, people have asked me a couple of important questions. For instance, they want to know why state government is so screwed up.

Reforming State Government Get The Principles Right and Solutions Will Follow

The simple answer is that Alabama's state government, and just about all local government for that matter, is dysfunctional because they operate in opposition to principles that promote quality and value. · Do we have enough money or do we need to raise taxes? [BirminghamTimes]

As the State Legislature prepares to levy the largest tax increase in the history of the state on us, people have asked me a couple of important questions. For instance, they want to know why state government is so screwed up.

Reforming State Government Get The Principles Right and Solutions Will Follow

The simple answer is that Alabama's state government, and just about all local government for that matter, is dysfunctional because they operate in opposition to principles that promote quality and value. · Do we have enough money or do we need to raise taxes? [BirminghamTimes]

While states scramble for money, the federal government is cutting taxes. What does that mean to the average American? Some will pay more to their state than they get back from Washington, others will come out ahead — depending on where they live and their habits, like smoking, drinking or speeding.

States craft budget plans

An Associated Press analysis of budget work in all 50 states found many are trying to target their tax hikes or increase fees — allowing politicians to make claims that they did not raise income taxes. But those states that have raised across-the-board taxes such as income, sales or property taxes will get more money.· Be prepared for tough times and tough choices [Dodgeglobe]

Friday, June 13, 2003

My goal as a "Mitteleuropean Centrist" is not to end capitalism: My goal is to make everyone a capitalist:
I recommend this column by Molly Ivins detailing how the Revenue Offices are tougher on the poor than on the rich.
· Rich/Poor [Molly Ivins]

Tax Mexican Aggressive Tax Positions

Everyone knows multinational financial corporations like Merrill Lynch structure every move of their business so as to take advantage of aggressive tax positions. The same is true for the way poor Mexican farm workers structure their family living arrangements. At least, that is what Tax Court Special Trail Judge Powell seems to think.
· *Arm *Orker [USTaxCourt (PDFile)]

A cartoon about the double taxation of dividend income? Czech it out.· Double Trouble [Comics Salon]

Headline of the year 2003 AD:Bush asks wealthy to do their part for the war effort by accepting massive tax cuts...

The Democratic candidates, William Saletan observes, I've seen other candidates speak for workers and against capitalist predation, but Edwards is trying to do something more ambitious: to reclaim the virtues of capitalism.

Presidents John Edwards for President?

On John Edwards' official site, the text of his Economic Policy Address At The Fortune Global Forum has this:
First, we should eliminate tax shelters that serve little or no purpose but to provide a legal way for companies to hide their income. Too many people benefit from America's public investments and capital markets and then renounce their citizenship to avoid paying their fair share. That is a disgrace, and it certainly shouldn't be legal. Companies shouldn't be allowed to deposit their officers' salaries in offshore accounts, so their officers can avoid taxes. And American companies should not be allowed to set up virtual headquarters in foreign countries that are hardly more than mailboxes so they can hide profits earned in America.
Second, we should put an end to one of the most distasteful practices the tax code allows - the deduction for life insurance that companies take out on their nonexecutive employees. Companies get billions of dollars in tax breaks by buying policies on thousands of secretaries and janitors who never see a dime of those benefits. Even if the company lays these folks off, they can maintain the policy, get a tax break for doing so, actually collect on the policy when the former employee dies, and get another tax break on top of that. The employees and their families often don't get a dime. The government should not be subsidizing companies to get tax breaks when their former secretaries die. It is economically pointless, it is morally perverse, and it should stop.
Third, we need to make sure that businesses and wealthy investors are held to the same standard as ordinary Americans when it comes to following our tax laws. Something is wrong when a poor working family is four times more likely to be audited than a corporation. Something is wrong when the White House is seeking to muzzle an IRS commissioner who has a simple warning: some fortunate but unscrupulous people are breaking our laws with virtual certainty they won't get caught. We can and we should save law-abiding citizens billions of dollars by requiring fair enforcement of our tax laws.
Finally, we need to take on the political obstacle course of corporate subsides. Washington isn't very good at this kind of thing, and that's why I think Senator McCain and Congressman Gephardt's proposal to establish a commission that will present a complete package for an up or down vote - like the Base Closing Commission - is a good idea.· Muzzling an IRS Commissioner [JE ]

Doing your taxes can be as easy as eating pie.
But only with Quicksand's ShirkoTax.
Otherwise you'll die(Conflict of Interest declared: Jozef Imrich owns shares in Quicksand)

Taxing timesQuicksand: Tax Panic Attack.

Resisting the temptation to sign off and hire a CPA, I kept reading:
This year's Schedule D (capital gains) is so convoluted even CPAs can't figure it out.
I was this close to a tax panic attack. Then I remembered -- Mark and I are the only U.S. citizens who didn't make a killing last year in the stock market.· Taxing Times [MadKane ]